Directional drilling is an important aspect of discovery of petroleum products in geotechnical formations. Directional drilling naturally gives rise to the requirement to autonomously control the attitude and trajectory of wells being drilled. Drivers may be used to control the drilling in order to maximize economic return of the drilling. Practical drivers for this include drivers that reduce well tortuosity due to target attitude overshoot as well as well collision avoidance. Conventional systems have proposed applications that enable sliding mode control to minimize errors in position and attitude. Other conventional technologies have approached path planning and trajectory following as an optimal control problem where researchers have tackled the problem using generic algorithms.
It is also the case that it is required to follow a predefined well plan as closely as possible, where the well plan has been optimally constructed off-line to minimize the measured depth of drilling given a set of target coordinates and drilling constraints, however conventional technologies have significant difficulties in achieving this result. There is a need to provide for directional drilling methods and apparatus such that control of the drilling procedure is used to develop path tracking for both path following and attitude hold applications.